Facebook Timeline For Brands: Not All It Is Cracked Up To Be?

A conflicting study to the one I mentioned here last week says that brands using the new Facebook timeline actually saw a decrease in fan engagement. A report released today says:

"Ultimately, Facebook users interact with brands on their own newsfeed and rarely, if ever, visit a company's timeline."

Given these results, the report supports the learnings from the book The Like Economy:

"Regardless of how Facebook changes the appearance of a page, this should rarely have a significant impact on engagement. This also suggests that brand managers must continue to focus on optimizing engagement within the news feed as usual."

There is no doubt that implementing Facebook Timeline for a brand and using all the features available within it will present the brand better to those fans that visit the actual brand page. Though the words of caution still stand: it is not a build and they will come tool when using Facebook. Rather the content produced by the brand must be relevant to the users targeted and interesting enough to engage with it for fans to continue seeing it in their news feeds.